How Dinosaurs Came To Rule The World

Galvasean

http://news.discovery.com/dinosaurs/dinosaurs-crocodiles-volcanic-eruption.html

(yeah yeah lazy posting by me, I'll do a proper write up tomorrow. Its late and I have work in the morning. Off to count some Protoceratops and get some sleep)

Galvasean

Some 200 million years ago, Earth was on the verge of either an age of dinosaurs or an age of crocodiles. It took the largest volcanic eruption in the solar system -- and the loss of half of Earth's plant life -- to tip the scales in the dinos' favor, say researchers.

The idea is not new, but connecting the eruption to a 200-million-year-old mass extinction event has not been easy. Now that link is confirmed in an exhaustive new study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research looks at ancient plant substances and other evidence in lake and ocean sediments from both sides of the 3.5 million-square-mile Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) eruption zone, better known nowadays as the Atlantic Ocean.

"We weren't convinced that volcanism caused the extinctions," said paleobiologist Jessica Whiteside of Brown University.

But that all changed when she and her colleagues found and accurately dated some unusual changes in the kind of carbon available to plants during the eruption. "We actually did a complete 180," she said.

Lake sediments to the west of the eruption in New England contain leaf waxes, pollen, wood and other plant materials that record what sorts of carbon was being incorporated by plants from the atmosphere during the eruption. The sediments are particularly useful because they -- as well as some ocean sediments of the same age in England -- are physically interwoven with some of the earliest lava from the giant eruption. So their overlap in time is undeniable.

*link to full article in OP*


Photo by Larry O'Hanlon